Model checking linear dynamical systems under floating-point rounding

Engel Lefaucheux, Joël Ouaknine, David Purser, and Mohammadamin Sharifi

We consider linear dynamical systems under floating-point rounding. In these systems, a matrix is repeatedly applied to a vector, but the numbers are rounded into floating-point representation after each step (i.e., stored as a fixed-precision mantissa and an exponent). The approach more faithfully models realistic implementations of linear loops, compared to the exact arbitrary-precision setting often employed in the study of linear dynamical systems.

Our results are twofold: We show that for non-negative matrices there is a special structure to the sequence of vectors generated by the system: the mantissas are periodic and the exponents grow linearly. We leverage this to show decidability of ω-regular temporal model checking against semialgebraic predicates. This contrasts with the unrounded setting, where even the non-negative case encompasses the long-standing open Skolem and Positivity problems.

On the other hand, when negative numbers are allowed in the matrix, we show that the reachability problem is undecidable by encoding a two-counter machine. Again, this is in contrast with the unrounded setting where point-to-point reachability is known to be decidable in polynomial time.

Proceedings of TACAS 23, LNCS 13993, 2023. 26 pages.

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